How to make your own online store?

Over past few decades, ecommerce industry has revolutionized and scaled globally. Therefore, the market opportunity has increased drastically attracting people to set-up their own online stores. Thankfully, setting up an online store has become quite simple. With a few guidelines and right motivation, you can create a source of income through your own ecommerce website.

Doing the Market Research

There are essentially two approaches towards starting an online store. Firstly, you are clear in your aspirations for your product and are simply looking for the right audience and marketing strategy. The second approach is to reverse engineer and find a niche within the market. It will provide you with an insight of the product demand and save you heaps of trouble in the long run.

It’s imperative to conduct proper market research by spending a few hundred dollars on ads prior to investing in the product itself. A useful tool for helpful market research is Google Trends where you can see the interest of the people within a particular product and how it has transcended over the years. You can visualize the areas around the globe where the growth rate is more so you may ship your maximum product accordingly.

SEMrush is another exceptional research tool that identifies any Adwords competitions and showcases the organic search volume for the product. In some scenarios, you may see no advertisement or SEO competition. It doesn’t imply that the product would be a tremendous failure but simply means no market has been created yet.

Which Products to Sell?

If you aren’t sure of the products you want to sell, you can go to different affiliate networks to sell their pre-made products. You can easily tap into the large affiliate network and sell credible products through your website. The affiliate method is quite effective as tremendous amount of work has already been done and you simply help selling the product. Amazon fulfillment is another popular option that is being utilized by some first time e-retailers. You can also sell your products like clothes online with platforms such as Shopify!.

Setting up your Online Store

Presently, setting up an online store has become exceedingly simple. Therefore anyone can setup their own online store by using one of these three options.

Magento

Undoubtedly it’s an amazing platform that offers multitude of options for customization. However, it does require a fair amount of knowledge to set-up if you are merely a beginner. Although the site is industry standard, it is the least user-friendly.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce powers majority of WordPress website globally. WordPress is quite user-friendly and offers a significant amount of options for customizability. Setting up through WooCommerce is quite simple and online guides are available for beginners.

Shopify

Shopify is undoubtedly the most user-friendly of the three options. The stores come pre-built with payment gateways already defined so you won’t have to install any third party scripts. Shopify does offer some customizability however the options are limited. You can use Ella to turn your Shopify interface into much more exquisite and glamorous.

eCommerce Website Trends in 2017

With accessibility comes an increase in expectations from the potential customers. Hence, it is essential to know the latest website trends to compete within the market.

Responsiveness of the website is important as customers use the website on multiple platforms including desktop, tablets and mobile phones. Product videos have extensively increased sales as they convey the meaning behind a product and highlight its benefits to the customer. People tend to buy similar products therefore personalization of the website is crucial so add a “recommended” products bar as well. Product demonstrations are much more effective in sales of a product rather than a simple product description.

With some knowledge and passion, you can easily setup your online store within minimum span of time.